Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  In the years following the 1971 Rolling Stone piece, things became very quiet on Fort Hill. Lyman became more reclusive. The community, once so publicity hungry, no longer honored most press requests. By that point, Mel Lyman had been written about by such New Journalism deities as Hunter S. Thompson (Mel’s mentioned in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Tom Wolfe, and Lester Bangs, but none of the exposure had been positive. The Family now focused on growing their Fort Hill Construction Company in Los Angeles; its success, together with the Benton inheritance and their pooled-resources ethos, transformed the group from the kind of people who used to dig through Dumpsters for food to those who could live comfortably in any one of their many homes across the United States. In the long run, being a part of the Fort Hill Community turned out to be financially rewarding for those who stuck with it and kept their sanity intact.

  It was a surprise when, in the mid-eighties, the Fort Hill Community revealed to the public that Mel Lyman had passed away in April 1978. They never presented a death certificate, provided details about how he went, or disclosed what they did with his remains. There was no legal investigation. The information put a weird spin on some earlier articles, such as the Boston Herald American piece from late March 1978 claiming that “even in the ephemeral state, Mel still holds the power over a large family of talented, intelligent and educated people.”

  Family member George Peper called Felton a decade after his piece and invited him to dinner. “He told me Mel had died in France. He didn’t say much more about it, and nothing has been written about it, and it is kind of a mystery. I think there’s two possibilities. One: He did die of failing health, his health was never too good, that’s what they claim. But his death certificate has never been shown or anything like that. The other possibility is that he didn’t want the responsibility of being God anymore.” He considers. “He may be living somewhere in Europe. He could still be alive!”

  * * *

  • • •

  IT’S CURIOUS THAT THE LYMAN FAMILY wouldn’t leverage an event like Mel’s death in an attempt to rehabilitate their beloved leader’s reputation. If Lyman’s message was important and beautiful to them, why wouldn’t they try to set the record straight, to publish something that did make his message clear? Did they realize he was just a flawed human being who had momentarily dazzled them? Maybe they were still following Mel’s marching orders—this time, by telling everyone he was dead.

  After interviewing Jim Kweskin, I purchase a complete collection of Avatars from the Fort Hill Community—the twenty-three issues still available (there were twenty-five issues altogether, but there are no more physical copies of issue 2 and what happened to issue 25 is a story all its own) plus all four issues of American Avatar, its short-lived glossy magazine successor. Seen today, it perfectly captures Boston’s late-sixties counterculture. From the ads for area thrift shops, to the coverage of local antiwar demonstrations, to the notices of upcoming concerts by groups like Peter Wolf’s Hallucinations, Avatar is much more than an altar laid out for Mel Lyman.

  Studying the old mastheads, it’s curious to note how many names are still on the Fort Ave. Terrace mailbox. Trying to see how the Avatar staff ended up becomes a kind of hobby for me over the next few weeks. I often end up on Facebook, where I pore through profiles for any indication that these folks might be the same upstarts who shook up Boston fifty years earlier. On one such profile, among a sea of digital shots of family and grandchildren, is a lone, scanned-in picture of a man who looks strangely familiar. Then it hits me: He’s the spitting image of an older Mel Lyman.

  Could Felton be right? Or am I seeing things?

  THREE

  The Silver Age of Television

  IF YOU WERE WATCHING WGBH on February 7, 1968, in a house with two TVs, you were in luck.

  That Wednesday night, without warning, viewers were invited to take part in a radical experiment. Instructions appeared on the screen: “Gather two television sets in the same room. Place them six feet apart. Turn one to Channel 2. Turn the other to Channel 44.”

  On the left screen appeared a young British man named David Silver, who proceeded to interview theater director Richard Schechner. This footage was in black and white. On the right television, tuned to Channel 44, David Silver materialized in full color, adding commentary to the interview unfolding on the other screen, putting himself down as a phony. Elsewhere in the show, home viewers watched agog as the young British invader played Ping-Pong across screens, the tiny white ball magically zipping between two unconnected boxes in their living room.

  The show’s creators tried to keep the left program comprehensible without the aid of the other screen, “so that our audience wouldn’t freak out and turn it off.” Up on Fort Hill in Roxbury, the experiment impressed the impossible-to-freak-out mystic of Avatar, Mel Lyman. “I was only able to view the half that was shown on Channel 2 but that was sufficient to produce a wholly positive and enthusiastic response in me,” Lyman wrote in an open letter to Silver published in the paper’s next issue. “By God Dave you really ARE a pioneer in television, your show is without a doubt the most real, the most alive, the most IMPORTANT thing happening in the TV medium . . . I want the word to get around. WATCH THE SILVER SHOW ON TELEVISION!”

  For two years, twice a week, What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? transformed home televisions into portals for a psychedelic fever dream, uninterrupted by commercials or common sense.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN HE WAS GROWING UP in East Lancashire, England, David Silver’s first love was Shakespeare. He attended the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, and saw every play put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company for four years. At the same time, he was enchanted by the raw power of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. He stayed for two degrees, writing his postgraduate thesis not on the Bard but on a contemporary American author: Saul Bellow. Silver’s tutor sent it to Sylvan Barnet, a Shakespeare scholar at Tufts University, who was so impressed he invited Silver to come teach in Boston. Silver soon moved into his new home on Brattle Street in Cambridge. At twenty-two, he was the youngest “instructor professor” the school ever had.

  With heaps of UK bands making inroads on the pop charts, David Silver instantly became a popular figure on the Tufts campus. Karen Thorne clearly remembers his arrival. “He looked like a dead ringer for Mick Jagger,” she says of her teacher who was only a year older. “He took one look at me and I became his girlfriend. I can’t explain it any other way.” With a word of caution, Tufts was willing to let young love bloom between a student and a professor. The couple fell for each other and the city at the same time, shopping for records at the COOP in Harvard Square and attending concerts at the Boston Tea Party.

  One evening in April 1967, the couple was watching TV with mounting boredom. Thorne complained that nothing on the tube resembled “our lives or our culture or our desires.” She told Silver he should change that: “You’re English, you’re trendy, you look the right way.”

  Silver recalls that a poetry professor at Tufts knew a producer at WGBH and set up a meeting for him. Thorne, on the other hand, is certain that they walked into the WGBH offices off the street, telling a receptionist, “We have an idea for a show. Who should we talk to?” Whatever the case, Silver got a meeting with director Fred Barzyk.

  Barzyk came from Wisconsin to WGBH in 1958. The nonprofit station had only been on air for four years, employing fifty people at its Massachusetts Avenue headquarters near MIT in Cambridge. Though Barzyk had aspired to a career in theater, not television, the $85 a week was hard to turn down. Shortly after arriving, Barzyk had a series of arguments with two WGBH producers about their coverage of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—the station’s most popular offering. “I felt there was more to do visually than cut from the oboe to the trombone at the right moment,” he says. “Why couldn’t we make abstractions timed to the music revealing a visual understanding
of the music?”

  Barzyk kept looking for a way to take the avant-garde sensibility he had fallen in love with in college and apply it to television. On the wall of his apartment off Beacon Street, he chalked his new motto on the wall. It read “ETV IS DEAD,” referring to “Educational Television,” WGBH’s bread and butter. He thought educational television had an identity crisis: “Was it high-minded talking heads or how-to shows? Was it Julia Child or strong political documentaries? Or was it to reach to the young audience we had in Boston?”

  The old guard at WGBH wanted to hold the line, but six years later, the burgeoning popularity of the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan gave Barzyk what he needed to push for change. McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man introduced the concept of “the medium is the message.” “I never even finished one of his books,” Barzyk confesses. But it didn’t matter. To the leadership team at WGBH, Barzyk looked like an expert on a developing zeitgeist. A few years after McLuhan’s rise, Barzyk got another lucky break when the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts provided artists with a chance to try out their talents on the small screen. Experimental television labs popped up in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. The funding removed the lingering hesitations at WGBH. It was finally time to do something more than just cut from the oboe to the trombone.

  David Silver recalls Barzyk’s vague but exciting proposal from their first meeting: “We’re gonna set up a situation in Studio A and you’re just going to . . . do things, and hopefully they’ll like you.” One day in May 1967, David Silver entered the studio and found a table full of magazines waiting for him as his only prompt. Silver riffed on an issue of Cosmopolitan. It wasn’t good. But six weeks later, Barzyk told him they were scheduled to do a five-part series, one hour each with the possibility of more. Another program director had seen it and decided Silver was the man for the job.

  Management who assumed that Barzyk would simply throw together something quaint hadn’t considered his love of offbeat theater. The show would be the equivalent of a video happening, “a scrambled exploration of nonsense and critical info,” he says.

  Silver did press before a single episode had aired. “It makes me angry to see television not getting anywhere near its potential after all this time,” he wrote in the August 1967 issue of New England Teen Scene. “We have color, satellites, instant replays—yet the vast majority of television programming drags years behind its own space age technology. How long must we, the public, wait for this to change?”

  Only about twenty minutes of scattered clips exist online. David Silver has agreed to show me a few of the full episodes. “God knows what this is,” he says softly, squinting as he scrolls through a video player on a laptop. “This was just craziness.”

  The show is about to begin.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT GOES LIKE THIS: A swarm of inkblots. Cut to a circular logo bouncing across the screen. A child announces the title of the show, then looks confused. A Jim Kweskin song plays as the inkblots return. A half-second clip of a woman in a red dress, staring off into the distance. Edits happen without warning and truncate sentences throughout. Host David Silver sits on the floor and asks the woman a question, but her answer goes unheard—cut to stock footage of a man talking about producing high school yearbooks. Cut back to the woman telling Silver about an impending “cataclysmic event.” Microcuts to old commercials. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” starts to play.

  Behind Silver and the lady in the red dress, a dozen young people dance wildly. Seated to their left and right are an extremely old man and woman, watching. Backward sequence of Silver eating a banana. Stock footage run through an effects module rendering it new in an array of psychedelic color patterns. Black-and-white scene of samurais fighting. The editing pace quickens. Four distinct audio tracks play at once, often at odds with one another. Silver, all in black, fences with a woman dressed all in white. Inkblots overlay the duel. A woozy pattern spins as we hear news reports on the Vietnam War.

  “You could be frozen for several hundred years,” a woman in a floral pattern dress tells Silver while the dancers clap in time behind them. “That would break up the monotony of eternity.” The elderly pair looks confused. Dave Wilson, an Avatar founder, drives his motorcycle onto the set and does loops around the whole scene, the exhaust thickening. “Mustang Sally” by Wilson Pickett plays. Silver lies down with the woman on the floor, the dancers keep swaying, and Wilson continues to circle everything with his hog. With no fanfare, the end credits appear. The sound fades out. You’re left in total silence, watching the elderly pair’s reactions. They do not understand what just happened. Do you?

  The episode, “Madness and Intuition,” won a National Educational Television award.

  Barzyk used every film chain and videotape machine he could find to create it. “I had groups of thousands of slides being projected,” he recalls. He said that whenever anyone got bored, they should just yell out, so that he could cut to something else, without rhyme or reason. He assumed that everything would make sense in the end. Twenty-two minutes into the half-hour show, he got up and left; the episode had taken on a life of its own and no longer required a director.

  “I asked video engineers to ignore the idea of perfectly matched cameras,” Barzyk says. “I told them to do ‘mistakes’: oversaturate the colors, flip to negative, wash over the real picture with artificial colors from their electronic controls.” Sometimes they’d sit in the control room after a live airing, waiting for viewer feedback. “Some woman called the station complaining that she hated the show and that the cuts were too quick,” Karen Thorne says. “She said the show was giving her brain cancer. Fred loved that. He told everybody that the show was giving this woman brain cancer.”

  Silver says “Madness and Intuition” was probably inspired by a mutual appreciation for Allan Kaprow, who had helped developed the concept of performance art in the late fifties and early sixties, culminating with his instructional record released in 1966 entitled How to Make a Happening. Kaprow would have enjoyed the episode and its aftermath. From his rules for a happening: “Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion for sale.”

  There were certainly experimental films around that approached the level of absurdity found in Silver and Barzyk’s creation, but the difference was that this program snuck into people’s homes twice a week. And it wasn’t just Boston airing the madness. What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? appeared on thirteen partner stations across the United States. Andy Warhol may have been the superstar of the experimental film world, but even he had to convince you to seek out his movies. For Barzyk and Silver’s form of madness and intuition, you didn’t even have to leave your couch.

  Silver and Barzyk owed a debt to Warhol’s pioneering work, and the British TV host was ecstatic when, in 1967, he learned that Warhol was coming to town with the Velvet Underground and wanted to be on the show. They shot the segment in an upstairs room at 53 Berkeley Street, the home of the Boston Tea Party, where the Velvets were headlining that night. Warhol and VU chanteuse Nico, director Paul Morrissey, and another regular from the Factory sit around while Silver tries to coax genuine information out of the group.

  SILVER: Would you call yourself a director?

  WARHOL: No, the people I cast usually direct the movie.

  SILVER: What do you do, just watch?

  WARHOL: Yes, I get my thrills that way.

  SILVER: What would your reaction be to a critic or person who looked at one of your films and just said, “Rubbish. Trite nonsense. Boring”?

  WARHOL: Well, that’s the way we feel about it. [Everyone laughs]

  SILVER: You really do? You’re not putting me on?

 
WARHOL: Yes.

  SILVER: Are you interested in making more conventional type of movies?

  WARHOL: Oh yes. That’s all we’re gonna do right now. Is make conventional movies.

  SILVER: Will you continue your artwork?

  WARHOL: No, we’re just gonna make conventional movies.

  NICO: Bow-tie movies. [Laughter]

  WARHOL: What’s a bow-tie movie?

  NICO: Bow-tie movies. [Displays an imaginary bow tie on her neck]

  SILVER: This is a conventional movie?

  MORRISSEY: It’s what all the kids are doing nowadays.

  WARHOL: I think any camera that takes a picture comes out all right.

  Something like this aired every Wednesday and Sunday at 10:30 p.m. Newsweek loved the show. Gregory Mcdonald, who went on to write a popular series of novels about a smart-ass detective named Fletch, called it a “weekly half-hour mind blower” in his Boston Globe piece, which appeared on New Year’s Eve 1967.

  By the end of the more-or-less half-hour program (so far it’s run anywhere from 25 to 41 minutes) you’re a beat-up mess on the floor, hand groping for the Off switch while the title credits count ten over your bloody, bowed head.

  “I never miss it,” said a lady who hates the program. “I never can believe it makes me as mad as it does.”

  “If we’re going to be radically new,” Barzyk says, “we ought to disturb people, rather than satisfy them. If we ever get too much good comment on anything, we know we have failed. If we ever leave the audience knowing what we think, we fail. Our idea is to make the audience think.”